WOODSTOCK
Message To Love
Guitarist celebrates the 50th anniversary of the legendary 1969 event, sharing the best of the guitar stories from the festival’s greatest performances
By turns shambolic, historic, hallucinatory and majestic, the Woodstock Festival of August 1969 marked both the pinnacle of a revolution in music – and the beginning of its fall. It also gave us some of the greatest moments of wild, unfiltered guitar genius the world has ever witnessed. Join us as we celebrate its 50th anniversary and uncover the six-string stories behind the festival’s greatest performances, from Hendrix to Ten Years After…
The rock festival that crowned a decade-long musical revolution took just six months to organise. And like many 60s happenings, Woodstock was launched on a flood tide of peace and love – with a fishy glint of money-spinning ambition not far beneath the surface.
The festival was originally intended as a profit-making venture – and only became a free festival when it became apparent the gig was attracting hundreds of thousands more people than the organisers had readied themselves for. The final straw was when the fence was torn down by desperate swarms of ticketless fans.
But, for the four men who put the festival together, that was all in the future. They were John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang – and the oldest was just 26. Together, they paid an estimated $50,000 to rent around 600 acres of Max Yasgur’s farm in an out-ofthe-way corner of the Catskill Mountains in New York State. Heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune, John Roberts paid for the event via a multimillion-dollar trust fund and a lieutenant’s commission in the army. It was typical of the era’s naive optimism that John had only ever seen one rock concert (The Beach Boys) before he set his sights on staging the musical event of the decade.
Meanwhile, the landowner who rented the site to them, Max Yasgur, had studied real estate law at NYU before moving back
to the family farm in the 40s. At the time of Woodstock, he was the biggest milk producer in Sullivan County. Joining forces with the four young men to stage a festival was thus both an unlikely partnership and a step into the unknown. Yasgur later revealed to Life magazine, in 1969, that he’d made a ‘deal’ with promoter Lang. “If anything went wrong, I was going to give him a crew cut. If everything was okay, I was going to let my hair grow long. I guess he won the bet, but I’m so bald I’ll never be able to pay it off,” he joked. The wager was accepted, however, and Woodstock concert tickets went on sale at $6 a day (and were due to sell for $8 on the gate), while three-day advance tickets were priced at $18. The price at the gate was set at $24.
Waking The giant
At exactly 5.07pm on Friday 15 August, Richie Havens opened the festival with Minstrel From Gault. His song Freedom was improvised on the spot. Called back for so many encores that he simply ran out of songs, Havens picked up his guitar and started singing, taking lyrics from the old spiritual staple Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child. A lesser musician might have buckled improvising on acoustic to an audience of half a million people, but Havens had developed his own way to set stage fright aside and perform with grace under pressure.
“The first time I played the Newport Folk Festival in 1966, I was so nervous that when I sat on the stool my knees were actually knocking,” he later recalled. “There were 9,000 people there! To me, it felt like 109,000 people – and here I was up on stage, not playing a ‘real’ guitar, and playing it my way. I thought I’d be laughed off the stage, but I said to myself, ‘There’s a giant lying in front of me. His feet are at the front of the stage and his head is away back by the fence. If I can just make him lift his head a little bit to see who’s playing, then I will have accomplished being in the whole room!’”
Havens’ bravura performance was delivered with a mahogany-bodied Guild acoustic that he used instead of the more prevalent Martin D-18s of the era, due to its less bass-heavy sound.
“The first guitar I played was a Martin. I loved it, because it had the deep bass, but I realised later that it was too good for me,” he recalled. “And you couldn’t take Martins on the road too well, either – they would
Politically charged folk artists, with just an acoustic, were a hallmark of the festival
lose their clean octave and you would have to get it fixed before you could play it. So I borrowed a Guild D-40 from somebody, which had equal volume on all the strings – whereas the Martin was so bass-heavy that you couldn’t hear the third string, which I used to change my chord from major to minor. So when I first heard the Guild, I went, ‘Whoa, you can really hear it.’ That really changed my view. And I kept playing the Guilds until they had four-inch holes in them. I got a reputation for putting holes in the guitars, because I had to play them hard for the mics to pick them up.”
Politically charged folk artists taking the stage armed with only an acoustic guitar – like David facing a Goliath audience – were a hallmark of the festival. With her husband imprisoned for resisting an army draft, Joan Baez played a Martin acoustic to sing the redneck-baiting Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man with Jeffrey Shurtleff, who “dedicated” it to then Governor of California and keen draft advocate Ronald Reagan.
Other leading lights of the folk scene missed the boat, however. Joni Mitchell was slated to appear, but was convinced by her manager that it was a better career move to appear on Monday’s The Dick Cavett Show, rather than “sit around in a field with 500 people”. She has since admitted it was one of the biggest regrets of her life.
Perhaps the most regretted declined invite, however, came from the unfortunate Tommy James & The Shondells. Misinformed about the size and scope of Woodstock, they turned it down immediately. “We could have just kicked ourselves,” rued James later. “We were in Hawaii and my secretary called and said, ‘Yeah, listen. There’s this pig farmer in
Upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.’ That’s how it was put to me. So we passed, and we realised what we’d missed a couple of days later.”
It might have comforted The Shondells to know that many of the acts who did agree to play Woodstock weren’t destined to make it, either. In a stroke of particularly bad timing, The Jeff Beck Group had broken up just weeks beforehand. Meanwhile, Iron Butterfly were stranded at the airport. They might still have made it had their fuming manager not demanded helicopters and special transport arrangements to the site. The band were promptly wired back via Western Union and told to “get lost”.
Even those who did make it to the stage weren’t home and dry, due to chaotic stage management. The Grateful Dead’s set was beleaguered by technical problems, including a “faulty electrical ground”, which meant that Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir experienced shocks every time they touched their guitars – hardly conducive to a great performance. Unsurprisingly, The Dead called Woodstock their worst ever performance and they were left out of Michael Wadleigh’s subsequent movie.
The movie of the festival is worth enlarging on as, half a century later, its hand-held, fly-on-the-wall vividness has burned its way into the public imagination. The 27-year-old Wadleigh was a Columbia University dropout who had given up neurology to become a filmmaker. At Woodstock, he shot 315,000ft of film, capturing some epoch-making moments of guitar history, such as Hendrix’s performance of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Not everyone welcomed the unforgiving eye of the lens, however. “Woodstock was a bullshit gig,” Neil Young later complained to biographer Jimmy McDonough. “Everybody was on this Hollywood trip with the fuckin’ cameras.”
Riding The Wave
But for all the acts who were wrong-footed by technical gremlins and bummed-out by the cameras, there were others who caught the wave of history and rode it, ready or not.
Leslie West of Mountain summoned up some of the most sublime guitar sounds of the whole festival during the band’s bluessteeped set – but, true to the improvised spirit of the event, neither his guitar nor amp were his first choice, as he later explained to Guitarist.
“Well, when we started as Mountain, Felix Pappalardi produced the group as my bass player and when I went to rehearse I had a crappy guitar – I forget what kind – and he just told me to go down to this guitar shop in the Village,
in New York – Greenwich Village,” West recalled to Guitarist. “Matt Umanov had this guitar shop, and Danny Armstrong fixed amplifiers and then he had his own Plexiglass guitar. But then in the Village there was a shop Felix said had a guitar that belonged to Eric Clapton. It was a Gibson Les Paul that had his name on the headstock, but had a crack in the neck. So Felix said go down there and get that one, and use that.
“So I’m all nervous and stuff, and I went down there to this store and they didn’t have it – they said they couldn’t find it. And so they gave me a Les Paul Junior, you know? And I looked at it and I said, ‘Jesus: it’s like a tree with a microphone on it.’ So I got back to rehearsal and Felix said, ‘Where’s the other guitar?’ I told him, ‘They said they couldn’t find it.’ And he goes, ‘Bullshit, I guarantee they kept it.’ Who knows what they did with it. So there I was stuck with a Junior. But somehow it stuck,” he said of the guitar he later used at the festival.
But the P-90 growl of the Junior was not the only happy accident behind West’s legendarily good tone at Woodstock. An unusual choice of amplifier also played a central role in his performance.
“The Sunn Coliseum PA heads that I used on the first two albums had four mic inputs and a master,” he told Guitarist. “I thought I was getting Marshalls and we’re playing Fillmore and then these amps show up and I thought, ‘What am I gonna do with this?’ So I had to make do, but lo and behold for some reason it had a unique sound, especially on Mountain Climbing! and on Nantucket Sleighride. I actually told Sunn afterwards that I used them on my first album and I used ’em at Woodstock. I said, ‘You know this PA head is a really, really good guitar amp.’”
Carlos Santana, meanwhile, somehow managed to stay focused to deliver an incredible, ecstatic performance of Soul Sacrifice with an SG Special, a landmark musical moment that broke him onto the world stage – despite being almost incoherently high on acid.
“If we were all surfers, some of us got wiped out,” Carlos told Guitarist in 1989. “A lot of people know that I was under the influence of LSD when I went on stage at Woodstock – and I mean peaking… In the amoeba state! But I wasn’t so out of it that I couldn’t play. But I just kept praying to the Lord. I said, ‘Lord, please keep me in time and in tune.’ I wasn’t concerned whether they liked it or not or whether they were going to kill me… I was concerned with me staying in time and in tune [because] then it made sense. But the guitar was like one of those Dali paintings, you know? Everything was melting and it was like… ‘Oh, Lord.’”
Final acT
Other acts had less of a trial by fire. The Band had recorded their landmark album Music From Big Pink in West Saugerties, only a few miles from the festival ground, the year before. As ‘locals’ already, they resisted changing their style to please the out-of-town crowd as Robbie Robertson, guitarist with The Band, recalls.
“We were the only group at the festival that was actually from Woodstock,” Robbie says. “And so they had said to us, ‘Listen, you and Bob Dylan are the reason that we
“Watching this sound wash over the crowd… felt more like a spiritual experience than a festival”
even want to do a festival called Woodstock, because you put this place on the map.’ We had been trying to find a sanctuary, a place where we could go and make music, and do things in a natural underground. We had no idea this was going to turn into the most famous small town in the world. And so when they said, ‘Will you play at the festival?’ Albert Grossman, our manager, said, ‘I really think you should – you’re the authenticity in it.’ And then they said, ‘Well, we would really like you to close the festival,’ because of the authenticity of it.
“So we were like, ‘I guess, but I don’t know if what we do is what they’re looking for.’ But, you know, we went along with the whole thing. And then Jimi Hendrix told me that they had promised him that he could close the festival, so I was like, ‘Fine, I don’t care.’ Someone had said we’d play at nine o’clock on the last night or something like that. And when we went out and played, it was such a different mood over the half-million people. Because they were like, ‘We wanna sweat and we wanna rock and we wanna feel fucked up and crazy and jump up and down.’ And we were like, ‘No, this is going to be like listening to hymns. We are not going to provide that – that’s not our job and it’s not the sound that we made on Music From Big Pink.’ And so, anyway, it was interesting watching the crowd relate to this sound washing over them when we were playing. And they went there. They went there and it almost felt more like a spiritual experience than a rock festival,” Robertson concludes.
That left Hendrix to close the event, but his prospects for delivering a historic performance didn’t initially look good. He was scheduled to begin at midnight on the Sunday, but due to the whole event running many hours late, he didn’t take the stage until 9am on Monday 18 August. Hendrix, whose contract stipulated that no act could follow him, was the highest earner at Woodstock, receiving $32,000 out of a total of $180,000 spent by the festival on artist fees. But his monumental two-hour “Woodstock was an object lesson in how to play the guitar… Jimi was searching for a new direction” set was delivered to a dwindling audience of 30,000 to 80,000 people.
“I think that Woodstock was an object lesson in how to play the guitar,” Jimi’s engineer and producer Eddie Kramer told Guitarist. “But what was leading up to that was… searching for the new direction, which he partially found in Gypsy Sun And Rainbows, which is the band that played at Woodstock. Mitch [Mitchell] and Billy [Cox] and Jimi were tight; the rest of it, I am not so convinced,” he added.
And so it was that an untried line-up, playing to a waning crowd at the mudspattered, comedown-jaded death of the festival, delivered what is now arguably seen as the most extraordinary live guitar performance in history.
Jimi opened with Message To Love, a Band Of Gypsies composition, then powered through two heavy-hitting staples of his live shows: Hear My Train A Comin’ and Spanish Castle Magic. Halfway through the next number – Jimi’s perennial blues Red House – the high E string of Hendrix’s Olympic White Strat (see box on p70) broke, so he finished the song with just five strings. Unfazed, he rode straight over this hurdle to deliver Mastermind, a Larry Lee number, Lover Man, Foxey Lady and a blistering fusilade of old and new songs including Izabella and Voodoo Child. But it was his rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner that set Jimi’s Woodstock set forever apart.
Peace & love
Splitting the Woodstock air with the roiling, tortured sound of Marshall, Uni-Vibe and Strat pushed to their limits, Jimi transformed America’s national anthem into a howling evocation of the Vietnam war, then at its height. When Jimi plunged the trem arm down again and again, you could almost see bombs fall and detonate while jets streaked low overhead. As vivid as a fever-dream, it was a masterpiece of political art conjured from pure sound – or what Frank Zappa once called “Air Sculpture”. Somehow it was both a powerful indictment of the war and a left-field salute to those who fought and died in it, whose number Hendrix could so easily have been among had his army career not been ended in honourable discharge. It captured America’s proud but divided spirit at that crossroads in history perfectly. If any point could be said to both crown and mark the end the era of peace and love, it was the closing bars of that extraordinary piece of music.